North America’s Startup Funding Falls In Q3 As AI Giants Eye The Public Markets
In total, investors poured $92 billion into seed- through growth-stage rounds for U.S. and Canadian startups in the third quarter, per Crunchbase data. That’s a 35% decline from the prior quarter but up 50% from year-ago levels.
North American startup funding fell in Q3, falling short of an all-time peak, but the decline is attributed to the absence of new funding rounds for OpenAI and Anthropic. Investors poured $92 billion into seed- through growth-stage rounds for U.S. and Canadian startups, representing a 35% decline from the prior quarter and a 50% increase from year-ago levels.
AI remained the dominant theme for startup investors, with roughly two-thirds of total funding this quarter going to AI-focused companies. Late-stage and technology growth funding saw an increase of about a third, with key rounds going to Databricks, Crusoe, The Boring Co., and Cognition. Early-stage investment also held up at high levels, though down from prior peaks.
Seed-stage dealmaking was also active, with notable rounds for Walden Robotics and Veeda AI. Exits were dominated by M&A activity, with Nvidia's acquisition of Hugging Face and AMD's purchase of World Labs being the largest deals. IPOs were relatively scarce, with only 17 venture-backed North American companies going public, raising just under $4 billion.
Written by urgent.news from Crunchbase News's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
